WILSEY_022_CG.JPG
Dede Wilsey is the woman who raised the $200 million in private money to build the new, publically-owned de young Museum. She's an affluent San Franciscan active in art and social circles who's spent the past 10 years twisting arms for the cash to build this beautiful new museum. Photo by Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The San Francisco Chronicle
Photo taken on 9/28/05, in San Francisco,CA. Ran on: 10-11-2005
Dede Wilsey, who for 10 years has sought funding for a new de Young Museum, has long championed philanthropic causes. Ran on: 10-11-2005
Dede Wilsey's successful capital campaign gives her reason to smile at the new M.H. de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. less

WILSEY_022_CG.JPG
Dede Wilsey is the woman who raised the $200 million in private money to build the new, publically-owned de young Museum. She's an affluent San Franciscan active in art and social circles ... more

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez

Image 2 of 4

deyoung06_083_pc.jpg
A bicyclist pedals past the main entrance and tower. Exterior views of the new de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park on 10/5/05 in San Francisco, Calif.
PAUL CHINN/The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND S.F. CHRONICLE/ - MAGS OUT less

deyoung06_083_pc.jpg
A bicyclist pedals past the main entrance and tower. Exterior views of the new de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park on 10/5/05 in San Francisco, Calif.
PAUL CHINN/The Chronicle MANDATORY ... more

Photo: PAUL CHINN

Image 3 of 4

dede wilsey in 1975 she was know as Dede Traina. Long time SF socalite raised more than $130 million to help build the De Young Museum. Photo taken Aug, 5, 1975.
Photo by Jerry Telfer

dede wilsey in 1975 she was know as Dede Traina. Long time SF socalite raised more than $130 million to help build the De Young Museum. Photo taken Aug, 5, 1975.
Photo by Jerry Telfer

Photo: Jerry Telfer

Image 4 of 4

PROFILE: Dede Wilsey / De Young built on one woman's charm, savvy / Undaunted by 2 failed bond measures, Dede Wilsey led $190 million campaign

1 / 4

Back to Gallery

Dede Wilsey sidled up to Steven Read several years ago at a party at Mondavi's Napa spread and broached the subject of a donation for the new de Young Museum. He asked her to send him some information. She told him flat out that wasn't her style and pitched him right there.

"I know you care about art," Wilsey recalled telling Read, a fellow museum trustee. "You must care about the museum. We need to rebuild it. I know you have money, and I need some of it."

Read pledged $1 million on the spot. Wilsey thanked him, said she'd confirm the gift in writing the next day and strolled over to museum director Harry Parker. "Harry," she said, "this is going to be easy."

President Trump addresses nation after mass shooting at Florida SchoolWhite House

Wilsey went on to raise more than $190 million for San Francisco's new $202 million de Young, which opens Saturday after a decade of wrangling and setbacks. A charming, savvy and willful woman who knows how much people can afford to give and makes a pithy case for why they should, Wilsey tapped friends and other patrons to build the bold new museum designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. After voters twice failed to pass bond measures to replace the old quake-damaged de Young, Wilsey waged an unprecedented campaign to build this city-owned museum with private money. She gathered up the largest collective gift ever made to a cultural institution in San Francisco, and one of the biggest to any American museum.

She also played a central role in picking the architects and lobbying politicians, commissioning new art and even choosing Italian stone flooring that wouldn't be hard on high-heeled feet.

People are more inclined to fork over a few million bucks for a new museum when the person asking for it has already put in $10 million and is known for giving away more money than she spends on the gems and gowns dutifully described in the gossip columns. Wilsey is the daughter of a diplomat collaterally descended from President James Buchanan and the maternal great-granddaughter of Dow Chemical founder Herbert Dow. She was married to the late Al Wilsey, a major philanthropist with a fortune from butter and real estate

"Dede is very direct, very clear, and sets an example," Read said. "She backs up everything she says with actions and money and passion." Read runs a Berkeley investment firm that deals in supermarkets and real estate. He was planning to make a sizable contribution to the de Young but ended up giving more after Wilsey worked him over.

As the project progressed, Wilsey convinced Read and other generous patrons to dig even deeper into their pockets.

"I ratcheted him up. I sold him a $5 million gallery," Wilsey said with a smile. A petite hazel-eyed blonde, she was sitting on a big white couch in the sun room of her Pacific Heights home, wearing a tan suit and pink sweater, a gold necklace and scalloped gold earrings. The room was flush with pink azaleas from the garden. A Monet painting hangs on one wall, a Picasso on another, a Magritte by the stairs. A Rodin bust sits across the room, and a green-and-gold Faberge egg nests in a case near the glass wall looking out to the bay.

After the museum was built, Wilsey noticed a small seating area near the second-floor American gallery bearing Read's name, overlooking the sculpture garden. The seating area hadn't been on the blueprints or named. She informed Read, the museum's building committee chairman, that it would cost him another $1 million.

"You are incorrigible," Wilsey recalls Read telling her with amused exasperation. She suggested he make the extra gift in his beloved mother's name. Read gave in, naming the space in honor of his children and their spouses.

Two weeks ago, she had what she called an expensive week. How much? "Seven figures." She gave to the San Francisco Zoo, the Boys and Girls Club of St. Helena, and the Monterey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, among others.

"It's a wonderful feeling. I'm just lucky I can give on a big level," said Wilsey, 61. She was in the news a few months ago when her stepson Sean Wilsey published a memoir that cast her as the wicked stepmother who poisoned his already troubled young life. She coolly dismisses it as a pack of lies. She'd rather talk about the museum to which she has dedicated a decade of her life.

When it comes to fundraising, "If I don't love the project, I can't sell it," she said. "If I love the project, I can do it and do it and do it. And I really loved this project."

Wilsey became president of the Fine Arts Museums' board in 1998 and took charge of the capital campaign in '96. She didn't anticipate spending years fighting for the new museum that got ensnared in fog city politics.

Wilsey remembers the night in 1996 when she and other museum officials gathered to wait for the results of the first city bond measure to rebuild the de Young. "It really hadn't crossed my mind that we might lose," Wilsey recalled. "Because I'm not a person who loses.

"And we lost. I couldn't believe it. We were driving home around midnight, and I remember turning my head and I had a couple of tears coming down. And Al said, 'Are you crying?' Al wasn't the most sensitive man in the world. Some people might've said, 'Oh, so sorry, sweetheart.' But that wasn't Al. So I thought, 'That's it. I have shed my last tear over the de Young.' "

After a second bond measure went down in '98, Wilsey vowed to the press and the dispirited museum staff that she'd raise the dough privately. "I thought, 'That does it. This is chickens -- . I'm going to get this museum built.' "

She went to work in her command-post dressing room, where she made fundraising calls on a long-cord wall phone while doing her hair and makeup. She laid the museum floor plan on her floor, scribbled names of potential donors on pink Post-Its, and placed them in various galleries. Kind of like a Reese Witherspoon movie.

"It's like Monopoly," Wilsey said with laugh. "This one gets Park Place, this one gets Marvin Gardens, this one does not pass Go. You figure out who you're going to sell those galleries to."

"Dede is more dedicated and focused on things she cares about than almost anybody I've ever met," said Willie Brown, who worked with Wilsey when he was mayor in the '90s and has known her for years. "She makes a maximum effort from her own resources before she makes a request of anybody else. She's very bright. And I love the fact that she's tough as nails, and totally straight. Bulls -- is not what she likes to be exposed to or steps in."

She's used to being the subject of chatter. The daughter of the late Wiley Buchanan, President Dwight Eisenhower's chief of protocol and one-time U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg and Austria, she grew up in Washington, where backbiting and malicious gossip are second nature.

"I lived in a city where everybody took potshots at everybody else, and I got sort of thick-skinned about it," she said. "You try not to take it personally, but of course, you do."

During her father's stint in Luxembourg in the early '50s, "I was defending the United States when I was 9 years old. I was brought up doing that -- I learned how to defend the president, the Republican Party, the policies."

The political skills she picked up as a kid proved invaluable as she responded to public criticism over the new de Young and navigated the museum through San Francisco's turgid planning process.

Wilsey was a regular in the social columns long before she moved to San Francisco in '65 after marrying shipping executive John Traina. She had spent summers at the family estate in Newport, R.I., and in the south of France, where her playmates included kids with names like Onassis. She received a load of press coverage when she made her social debut in 1961. Town and Country magazine named the spirited Connecticut College student debutante of the year and put her picture on the cover.

"It was terribly embarrassing to me," Wilsey said. She had two kids with Traina -- Trevor, now a dotcom entrepreneur, and Todd, a Los Angeles film producer. She divorced Traina, who then married romance novelist Danielle Steel, and got hitched to Wilsey after he divorced society columnist Pat Montandon. It all made for good gossip.

Al Wilsey died in 2002 at 82. Dede Wilsey manages his investment business late at night. She's often referred to as a socialite, which annoys her. "I don't think it applies to me," she said. "I think it's frivolous, and I resent being portrayed as a frivolous person, because I think I work harder than almost anybody I know."

Harry Parker agrees. He has seen Wilsey arguing the museum's case at dozens of public meetings; plowing through sheep-dung-dotted Scottish fields in the pouring rain to look at Andy Goldsworthy sculptures; breaking into a closed quarry in Assisi to take samples of pinkish stone for the museum. He can still picture her shimmying under the rock yard's cyclone fence in her Chanel pantsuit while a chained guard dog snapped and snarled, then digging a hole in the dirt with her hands so he could get in.

"She's adventuresome and humorous and fun to be around," he said. "She's the most memorable character I know."

And the new de Young, Parker said, couldn't have been built without her. "She was so generous herself, but the main contribution was to galvanize this whole group of philanthropists through her personal commitment, her charm and enthusiasm. Relentless is a good word for her. She just wouldn't let anybody walk away. She's so amusing that the conversation always begins with laughter. It's always convivial until the teeth lock in and the victim has nowhere to run."

For Wilsey, who calls the de Young staff her family, throwing herself into this project helped her cope with Al Wilsey's declining health -- he had heart surgery and a stroke before his death. When things went badly with the museum, she'd think, "Don't worry, because you've got a worse problem at home.' " And vice-versa.

"I always kept my equilibrium," Wilsey said. She's experiencing a little "pre-partum blues" as the museum's birth approaches after its long gestation. She's prepared for some people to hate the building, whose contemporary design she championed despite her own classical tastes.

"I'm going to say, 'Go out to the Legion of Honor. That's our other museum. It's the most beautiful classical building you can imagine. We have something for everyone."

The style of the new de Young "wouldn't be my taste for a house. But I know it's the right thing for the future."

The new de Young

The museum, in Golden Gate Park, will be open free to the public from noon Saturday through 5 p.m. Sunday. After that, it will be open 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday except 8:45 p.m. Friday. Admission is $6-$10, free for children under 13, and on the first Tuesday of each month. The museum courtyard, cafe, store, sculpture garden and tower can be entered without admission fee. For a schedule of opening weekend events, go to www.deyoungmuseum.org.